Here is the headline from an article I read the other day:
That is a very interesting headline. It brings to mind those Geico cavemen brushing their teeth before heading out to catch a ball game. Did they just brush or did they floss and use mouthwash, too? Did they brush before heading into the office before their highly advanced society collapsed back to the stone age.
Let’s press on. From the article:
The teeth have “grooves formed by the passage of a pointed object, which confirms the use of a small stick for cleaning the mouth”
Interesting what you can figure out from a couple little grooves in some 63,400 year old teeth. That must have been quite a few teeth they had to look at.
Well, actually it was just two molars.
Now that is quite a bit of extrapolation. I’m counterclaiming that nervous Neanderthals rubbed small sticks against their teeth as a way of self-soothing. The evidence clearly supports my claim.
If you really read the article, you can see that the scientists found a couple teeth and some other animal bones. They are pretty excited about the teeth because they are the first teeth that have been found in the area which is a pretty cool find.
However the headline jumps to a much stronger claim than is presented in the rest of the article.
Who cares? All of us should. With sites like Reddit and Digg gaining popularity everyday, headlines are often the only part of a story that we hear. Almost every night my wife asks me if I read some article that she read on the internet. I frequently am able to say, “Not really. I just heard a little bit about that.” That little bit is often just a title that I read on some site linking to an article that I didn’t bother to read.
I expect headlines that people submit to those voting sites to sensationalize the article. But sites like Reuters really should be careful with that especially when the article is about some kind of scientific research.
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